Tag: Lego

I didn’t make it to Brickvention this year, but Adrian O’Hagan did, and sent me this photo. It’s a Lego Myki reader… and on the back of it is a Metcard reader.

Adrian says when a Myki card was presented it beeped and displayed a balance (which may or may not have been the real balance; I’m assuming all the information on the card is encrypted). The Metcard version would take a presented Metcard, pretend to read it and then spit it back out again, just like in real life.

Adrian notes: “ironically the metcard worked without a hitch, but the myki was a bit buggy. Not sure if that was by design or not ;-)”

I’ve shopped at Minotaur Books for decades. I first found it in the early 80s when it was at the top end of Swanston Street. Then it moved to a multi-level shop in Bourke Street. Then to its current home in Elizabeth Street.

It’s always had way more cool stuff than I could afford to buy, though for some time in the mid-80s I was buying Doctor Who Monthly regularly.

Nowadays my kids love going there. Spotted last week…

Doctor Who “Lego” (compatible bricks):

…and, who would like a Doctor Who Myki holder?

(Sanctuary Base 6, for those who don’t remember it, was the base from the David Tennant story The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit.)

I’m hearing that there are incredibly long queues for Brickvention today at Melbourne Town Hall. Shame… when we went in 2009, the queues weren’t too bad. Perhaps they’ve become a bigger event than they realise.

(According to the web site 1000 members of the public attended in 2009, and 2700 in 2010. Clearly it’s growing.)

I realised I never blogged the pictures and video from 2009, so here they are now.

For the past year or two, Lego have advertised heavily around Christmas time on billboards and in newspapers. Surprisingly, they don’t direct you to the Lego web site, but say to search for “Santa’s little helper”.

This is tied into their advertising for those keywords on Google, which goes through to their web site with a gift suggestion applet. (For some crazy reason lego.com.au goes to a completely different web site.)

I guess they’re assuming everybody uses Google, not Bing or Yahoo or anything else, where Lego is not a prominent result for those keywords (though Bing suggests it).

Nonetheless, Lego seems to be doing well. An article in last week’s Sunday Age notes that the company faced bankruptcy in 2003, but has bounced back. And I know that when looking around Chadstone on Monday night for Lego for my nephew Leo for Christmas, some of the Lego shelves in Toys R Us, Myer, David Jones, Target and K-Mart were looking a bit empty.

I wonder if there’ll be (as there was with Star Wars and others) a Lego video game of it. That would be the game of the toy of the movie of the game.

(I remember playing the original Prince of Persia game in my uni days. Despite being a fan of the platform genre, I don’t think I’ve played any of the sequels. The Wikipedia article notes the author got the distinctive animation done by video-taping his younger brother, and links to one of the original videos. Very cool.)